Firefighters Deserve Better Tools

We owe them an X-Prize for fighting fire.

Tragic news: Nineteen firefighters were killed on June 30 battling a wilderness blaze in Yarnell, Arizona. “This is as dark a day as I can remember,” declared Governor Jan Brewer. The fallen firefighters, all members of a team called the Granite Mountain Hotshots, have received—and have fully earned—all gratitude and honor for their bravery and sacrifice.

Still, one must ask: Is there a better way to fight such fires? Is there a way that uses more technology—and requires less of humanity?

It is, of course, fitting and proper that we salute those who died fighting the Yarnell fire. As one Arizona eulogist wrote, “These are people who run toward the fire when the rest of us are running away.”

Indeed, memories of those lost fighting forest fires have long been a source of literary inspiration. The author Norman Maclean, most famous for his novella A River Runs Through It, spent the last decade-and-a-half of his life researching and writing Young Men and Fire, a work of novelistic non-fiction telling of a 1949 Montana forest conflagration that took the lives of a dozen firefighters.

Yet amidst the justifiable romance and reverence surrounding these heroes, it’s still fair to ask: Are we, as a nation, doing everything we can to keep them safe? Are we creating the tools that will save firefighters from such a deadly fate?

As of now, the answer is clearly, “no.” Here’s a Reuters report describing the last moments of the 19 Hotshots:

The doomed firefighters had managed to deploy their personal fire shelters, tent-like safety devices designed to deflect heat and trap breathable air, in a last-ditch effort to survive that ultimately proved futile, officials said.

Let’s just say it: we can do better. Little flameproof tents can help, of course, but they don’t prevent asphyxiation, or trauma from a falling tree, or simple broiling to death. And that’s strange, because this is a high-tech country that puts men on the moon—okay, used to put men on the moon—and stuffs petaflops of computing power into pocket-sized devices. It’s just not plausible that we can’t figure out how to keep men safe from the ancient scourge of burning wood.

Further inquiry will help sort out all the circumstances that led to the Yarnell disaster, but investigators will conclude, most likely, that the Granite Mountaineers were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. After all, firefighting, as it’s now conducted, is dangerous: on average, almost 100 firefighters die nationwide every year.

Journalist Kyle Dickman, writing for Outside magazine, recently published a description of how today’s forest-fire fighters do their jobs:

Some work on engine crews, manning the trucks that deliver water to the front lines. Others are smoke jumpers, who parachute straight into burning forests from cargo planes to stop small fires from growing.

Some, like my group, are hotshots, backcountry firefighters who use chainsaws, Pulaskis [a kind of axe], and rakes to cut firebreaks of bare earth around a blaze.

Chainsaws? Axes? Rakes? It’s hard to believe that this is the best way to fight flames that can reach 200 feet into the air.

Here’s how Dickman, who “embedded” with a different Hotshots unit last year, describes some of the work:

We spend the next eight hours tossing poison oak bushes off the ridgeline. The temperature soars to 105 degrees. A rookie hotshot goes down with heat exhaustion and recovers in shade from the thicket.

I watch a sawyer slip and drive his chainsaw into his leg, slicing his Kevlar chaps. That night I feel a poison oak rash forming on my forearms and ears. In the next two days it spreads all over my body, and my legs become so swollen that I can’t bend my knees.

Once again, let’s take nothing away from the stamina and courage of those who make hands-on firefighting their calling. But at the same time, let’s ask: is this really the best possible way to fight a fire?

Not only were the 19 Hotshots killed, but days later, hundreds of homes in the Arizona countryside were destroyed, and the fire continued to burn.

So we might be wondering: Where’s the “killer app”? Where’s the firefighting equivalent of a cruise missile? Everyone in Silicon Valley is solving problems that hadn’t even been thought of a few years ago—so why can’t some of that brainpower be pointed toward the firefighting problem?

To be sure, there’s a fair amount of technology already involved in fighting wildfires. Even if most US military aviation resources are overseas, it’s still the case that plenty of airplanes are dropping water and fire-retardant chemicals on fires. And, more recently, authorities have started making use of drone- and satellite-surveillance to better target fires.

Yet if we were really using technology at its best—and inventing all that we might yet need—then no brave soul would have breathe his last breath inside a personal fire shelter.

Indeed, as we think about how to apply automation to reduce or eliminate the human cost of firefighting, we might apply some hard-earned lessons—learned from our experience in warfighting.

Battle of the Somme

We can begin by noting that it’s not entirely a coincidence that the self-selected imagery of Hotshots firefighting teams closely resembles images from battlefields in past wars. In particular, the Del Rosa Hotshots of California chose, as their home page, a photograph that reminds us of a famous photo from the Battle of the Somme, back in World War One.

Much has changed, of course, from that famously ill-fated British offensive, launched on July 1, 1916, and yet as we look at the fires of June 30, 2013, we can see that many essentials have remained the same. We can also note that both firefighters and warfighters inevitably share similar values, including camaraderie at rest and gallantry in action.

A look at the websites of various Hotshot units shows us that the men—and they are almost all male—make extensive use of military-style patches and martial and macho iconography. There’s nothing, to be sure, wrong with that. After all, this is dangerous work, and throughout human history, men in danger have girded themselves for that danger.

Still, it sometimes becomes apparent that the danger, relative to the rewards, is far too great. The British Tommies, after all, had camaraderie and bravery back in 1916. One story from the Somme, often told, concerns the fate of a high-spirited young man, Capt. Wilfred Nevill, all of 21 years old, who had been a rugby champion in school.

And so when the whistle blew, signaling to Nevill and his men to go “over the top” and advance on the Germans, he thought he would make a sport of it by kicking a soccer ball across no-man’s-land–until he was killed, short of the enemy line.

At the time, Nevill was lionized in the British papers as a true sportsman till the end:

On through the hail of slaughter,
Where gallant comrades fall,
Where blood is poured like water,
They drive the trickling ball.
The fear of death before them,
Is but an empty name;
True to the land that bore them,
The SURREYS played the game.

However, in the years since, the verdict on Nevill’s brand of bravado has grown grimmer and bleaker. If the goal was to die in a blaze of poetic glory, Nevill succeeded; if the goal was to win the war, then Nevill, brave as he was, did not succeed.

More profoundly, all of Nevill’s commanders—those who thought that traditional infantry charges could prevail over barbed wire, machine guns, and high-explosive artillery—stand eternally condemned for their obtuse inability to apply to new thinking to trench warfare.

Winston Churchill later characterized the Allied offensives of those war years as “needless and wrongly conceived operations of infinite cost, in which the generals were content to fight machine-gun bullets with breasts of gallant men.”

In his search for a solution to the stalemate of trench warfare, Churchill pushed for decisive new technology—in particular, the tank.

But to do so, Churchill and others had to overcome the tradition-bound opposition of many military leaders. Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War from 1914-16, famously dismissed the tank as a “a pretty mechanical toy.”

One great strength of the military, of course, is its devotion to tradition–and yet that’s also its weakness. Yes, it’s tradition that binds people together and summons them to heroism and, if need be, to sacrifice. Yet at the same time, it’s tradition that can hold back progress, encouraging, for example, generals to waste the lives of their soldiers in the vainglorious pursuit of obsolete battle paradigms. Indeed, the gratuitous carnage of World War One provoked the French statesman Clemenceau to say, “War is too important to be left to generals.”

Shifting back from warfighting in the past to firefighting in our time, perhaps today, too, we can say that firefighting is too important to be left to firefighters. That is, we will always need courageous men and women, but at the same time, we need new thinking, and new technology, in order to augment that courage.

Many young people will always be willing to put themselves in harm’s way—for God, for Country, for kicks—but the nation as a whole should be wise enough to conserve life when it can.

So while the Hotshots of our time might be stoic about their losses, and manfully resolved to get up and fight again, the rest of us might wish to step in to prevent further deaths. Applying Churchill’s technophilic problem-solving spirit, let’s recognize that accomplishing the mission of putting out fires is more important than honoring the tradition of how they are put out.

So let’s ask: where are the Transformers when we need them? Where are those giant robots whose power we could use to put out those fires—and spare those lives, homes, and communities? If the idea of colossal machines swashbuckling around can sustain at least four Hollywood movies, then surely it can sustain one serious R&D project to prevent the next Yarnell disaster.

Yet we might also ask: Is that really the way scientific progress works? Is it really the case that someone dreams up some fantastical vision—and then someone else makes it real? Actually yes, that’s often how it works. It’s a well-recognized phenomenon that many technological breakthroughs were inspired by science fiction.

As Albert Einstein wrote in 1931, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.”

That’s what we need: technological evolution.

So yes, let’s hope that brainy people go to see the new movie, “Pacific Rim,” and come home inspired. The tagline of the film reads, “To fight monsters, we created monsters.” Sounds like a good idea: to fight monster fires, let’s create monster firefighters.

In fact, there’s a fair amount of ferment around the idea of firefighting robots. Colleges are staging competitions, and companies are building prototypes. And the US Navy is experimenting, too. We might further note that the same high-functioning robots could be applied to many other purposes, from warfighting to elder-caring. Indeed, with the right vision, we could see whole new industries for the US.

It’s possible, of course, that the specific idea of firefighting robots will not work out, or not be sufficient.

In which case, we might continue to think, to imagine, to prepare. We might, for example, deploy new airships that can dump one hundred times the amount of water on a fire as the workhorse C-130 aircraft.

And if we can whoosh down a hundred times the amount of water on a fire, why not a thousand times the water? Perhaps we could use airships trailing a hose to the ground, endlessly pumping and dumping desalinated water on the fire—as I argued here in 2012—till the flames are extinguished. Or maybe we could use water cannon, blasting barrages of water against the fire.

Finally, how much more could be accomplished if we offered an X-Prize for the best way to fight fires without putting lives at risk?

X-Prizers like to say their mission is “making the impossible possible.” That’s the right goal, and fully in keeping with our best spirit of American innovation.

If we had leaders who thought in these positive and problem-solving terms, not only would we have new and better ways to fight fires, but we’d also have whole new ways to enrich and empower America.

James P. Pinkerton is a contributor to the Fox News Channel and a TAC contributing editor. Follow him on Twitter.

I agree with the notion that it behooves us to apply technology, where necessary, to reduce risk.

However, some random thoughts:

1.)
“In his search for a solution to the stalemate of trench warfare, Churchill pushed for decisive new technology—in particular, the tank.”

In a way, developments with the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles helped commanders in Iraq maintain their operations with reduced risk to troops. I have no doubt that the heavy armor saved lives, but I do wonder if it really helped win anything. The US left Iraq as a “relatively” stable country and I’m not sure it would have been far better or worse sans the MRAPs. I realize that politics played a huge part in this, but I’ve always been curious whether, militarily, a more modest budget (no super bases) and keener strategy would have yielded the same, or better, security results.

2.) During World War II, the 555th Parachute Infantry Regiment (“Smoke Jumpers”) successfully fought fires in the west coast. Since they were military, I am guessing that most were probably equipped with no more than entrenching tools, possibly axes, and strong arms. I’m not trying to take anything away from the bravery of firefighters, but perhaps more manpower factors into the equation? While still low-tech, five hundred shovels beats a few dozen shovels.

3.) I know nothing about firefighting, but I was in the Army and believe that the military would be well-suited for a larger role in “internal” matters (not political). Namely, I think the Army would do well in patrolling the border and conducting search/rescue/fire operations. The Army has the manpower and organization for these undertakings. Additionally, it beats garrison and provides real training and experience. These missions would definitely not be without risk, but perhaps a smaller forward-deployed budget opens the pocketbook for new technology that keeps those troops safer in these hypothetical tasks.

I’m a career firefighter/paramedic in central MD and I largely agree with this article. Too many times we put ourselves in harms way simply to save one’s property. Property, that’s it.

My philosophy is unless somebody is trapped inside let the thing burn. Homeowners have insurance. Plus with water damage from firehouse, windows being shattered, etc., we’re all just messing up the house anyways. We have no business putting ourselves in harms way to save someone’s living room. And worst of all, some chiefs have us doing interior firefighting when it should be a defensive attack anyways. Stupid.

The real difference we make in the fire service today is EMS. A bunch of old timers would hate me saying that, but its true. 85% of the calls we run are medical calls.

The fire service has come a long way the past 20 years or so with safety and personal protection. For example, wearing medical gloves was considered to be wussy back in the 90s. Now a days it’s tantamount, and nearly all firefighters/EMTs/paramedics do it.

excellent post! when you think about what we spend “defending” the United States – surely a solution to forest fires can be found in the Preamble (domestic Tranquility… common defence…, and general Welfare)? I guess maybe it’s time for America’s “war on fire”.

How does this fit with it takes men on the ground to hold it and win victory? We have plenty of tools. We have plenty of technology. We have plenty of people anxious to contribute to stopping fires. We even have a starving beast. So what is missing again? Many of these massive fires could be better controlled and not reach the size they do with better forest management. Men on the ground clearing brush? Sounds expensive. Better stick to starving the beast, fantasy innovation and patriotic praise for those who sacrafice everything at the alter of an utterly failed ideology.

Firstly, I think that Don Quijote has nailed it. Anything that folks propose will cost money. Money that won’t get spent because that will require public funds. I suppose you could privatize firefighting or forest fire fighting, but all that will mean is that many fires won’t be fought as no one will pay to have them fought or won’t be able to pony up the costs on hours of notice. It costs millions to fight big fires, and almost no one, except perhaps Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and their sort, has the credit card to call upon the necessary funds to pay for a “for profit” forest fire fighting effort.

Secondly, I don’t think the author is aware of just how powerful a force of nature that is at issue. It’s all well and good to talk about how technology can be used to fight forest fires, but some of the monsters forest fires are so powerful and so energetic (read about firestorms and fires moving at 60 miles an hour over terrain, and pay attention to crown fires while you’re at it too), that it’s hard to imagine anything short of dropping a thermonuclear weapon on the fires to deprive them of oxygen and fuel, doing anything. This of course, causes its own issues. That or dropping an entire lake on a fire in one shot.

As far as moving the amounts of water necessary to put out the fires, consider of the sheer physics of it. A cubic meter of water (roughly 3 feet x 3 feet x 3 feet) weights a metric tonne. A whole lake has hundreds of thousands or millions of metric tonnes of water. Full scale mines (copper, coal, iron, oil sands take your pick) move that amount of material in a whole year, yet the author is talking about doing the same in hours or days. Doing that is impossible.

Also consider areas where water is scarce (I don’t think that Arizona has an abundance of the wet stuff). Slugging water hundreds of miles to fight a fire that could be anywhere, far from infrastructure that can supply the water simply will not be cheap or easy. Especially if it’s needed with hours or days of notice.

Chemical means of dousing the flames is perhaps possible, but when you need to cover tens or hundreds of thousands of acres of terrain quickly, well, that isn’t all that easy either. Remember, fires can move very fast and cover vast areas in hours, from a fire pit to 50,000 acres in 1 day. Strategic Air Command probably has the resources to react fast enough to an emergent situation that can get out of control that fast (a B-52 from Edwards Air Force Base can probably be anywhere in the U.S. in hours with a nuke to extinguish the fire), but that edifice cost hundreds of billions of dollars to erect and maintain. State firefighting services, will never have those kinds of resources, in the U.S. or anywhere else on Earth.

Nature is awesomely powerful. The idea that technology can overcome anything nature has to throw at us, is, frankly, unconservative and ridiculous. Try lashing the waves with chains so they obey you or stopping a tornado in its tracks by huffing and puffing at it. I suspect you’ll have as much success. We can’t even figure out how to permanently corral the evils caused by microscopic organisms despite the best minds working at it for decades, and those things don’t deal in 2,000 fahrenheit heat or 200 mile an hour winds.

Sometimes, you just can’t win and must flee before storm. I think that this is one of those times. Sadly for the fallen, they ran out of space or time to run and were consumed as a result.

I agree with several of the other posters. From what I can gather, these men were killed trying to protect homes and other structures. Those buildings should have been left to burn and the firefighters nowhere near the area, assuming no one needed rescuing. It is ridiculous to have men risk their lives to try to protect property from something as dangerous and widespread as Western forest fires. We don’t try to erect dykes, levees, and so on along stream banks DURING riverine floods, nor along the beach DURING storm surges, but that is the equivalent of what firefighters try to do in these cases. They try to build fire breaks WHILE the fire is raging right in their vicinity.

Folks want to live in dry, dusty, arid or semi arid areas with the potential for high winds and lots and lots of combustible vegetation like mesquite and wild oak? Fine, go ahead and live there. But buy insurance, and, when the crap hits the fan, get the hell out. Just like folks do along the seashore and waterways during floods.

It would cost a fortune to try to do more with technology, and it is not at all clear it would work anyway. Not every problem is solved by throwing money at high tech solutions. Some things are better managed than confronted head on. Educate folks about the dangers of living in these areas. Warn them that no one is going to be put in harms way to protect their property, so that insurance is not just a luxury, nor are evacuation plans. Do what we can to manage the forests, so that the vegetation does not accumulate year to year. But, when the “big one” hits, get everyone the hell out of the way, residents and firefighters alike. Save lives, let the fire burn itself out, and then rebuild, to the extent folks decide individually that the cost and the risk are worth it.

You know what firefighters love? When people who have never been near a wildland fire figure out all the problems with what they are doing and tell them that they ought to carry more stuff. You don’t have the first idea what it actually takes to contain a fire (and keep it contained). And that you never hear about 99% of the fires in this country because they’re managed well.

The *real* problem? People building their homes off into the urban/suburban–wildland interface and then expecting the Forest Service or the Park Service to come and put their lives on the line to save a neighborhood that is situated where fires have always burned.

Daryl hit the nail on the head, people that build there house in an area that has historically burned should know what they are getting into. If municipalities want to spend money to defend these homes, plop a fleet of CAT D6 dozers down (we don’t do this because a resource advisor tells up that this some endangered rodent habitat or an ancient artifact was found here), create some defensible space around the homes, and let the rest of the forest burn like it has the past 10,000 years. I salute all firefighters that have died in the line of duty, and offer my compassion to the families the Arizona firefighter’s leave behind. If you asked any of the homeowner’s that have lost homes in wildland fires if they would rather save their home or make sure those fireman made it back to their families, I bet 100% would rather see those firefighters live.

“If municipalities want to spend money to defend these homes, plop a fleet of CAT D6 dozers down (we don’t do this because a resource advisor tells up that this some endangered rodent habitat or an ancient artifact was found here), create some defensible space around the homes….”

That’s not why the CATs aren’t called in. They aren’t called in because there is no border. Put a barrier around today’s houses, and tomorrow a developer will be looking to build more houses on the other side of it. Houses will be built right up to the line of the National Forest/Park/Wilderness
Area/Recreation Area/State Park/State Forest/Wildlife Refuge or Management Area and so on, unless somebody stops them. Indeed, many of the aforementioned have homes INSIDE their borders, as they were already there when the unit was created. Those can be grandfathered out, eventually, but not the ones right on the borders. Greed on the part of developers and the any growth is good mentality on the part of town officials, and, more sadly still, the people they represent, are the problem.